Rebrickable - Reproducible Report
Introduction
Description
To create this report we made use of freely available Rebrickable dataset which describes Lego sets, pieces and interactions between them. Our main goal while creating this report was to create many enjoyable and aesthetically appealing visualizations as well as to present the enormous size of Lego industry. Most of the charts are quite hard to interpret from the get go and require some exploring which was made easy with plotly and interactiveness.
Analysis
Top 20 Parts by quantity
Simple bar chart showing top 20 parts by quantity. The most popular
part is a simple 1x1 brick which is used in almost every set.
Which is of no surprise because this piece is very versatile and can be
used in many different ways.
You can see that some parts are counted in hundreds of thousands
which is a lot. And serves well to show how big the Lego industry
is.
Number of Parts per year for a given theme
This is a bubble chart showing number of parts per year for a given
theme. Size of a bubble represents number of parts in a set and each
color of the rainbow represents a different theme.
I particularly like this visualization due to how colorful it is. Even
though it’s a bit cluttered at a beggining it creates a nice visual
effect and it’s not an issue due to the ability to zoom in
Colorful Lego
This one is nothing special, grid of pie charts each showing a color
distribution of a given theme.
It lets you see which themes are colorful and which are monochromatic,
or dominated by shades of gray.
Not particularly visually appealing but it’s a good way to show a lot of
data in a small space, and provide some maybe useful insight into the
colors of themes.
Tree map of theme hierarchy and percantage of spare parts in sets
Both these treemaps present hierarchy of themes and how many spare
parts are in a set belonging to a given theme.
The size of rectangle represents number of parts in a given theme and
the hue of a color represents percentage of spare parts.
First one although a bit cluttered is easy to instantly extract some
conclusions from. Such as that educational sets have almost non spare
parts probably because they are not needed in educational projects which
are usually bought by schools. Seasonal sets have way more spare parts
compared to other themes probably to lower risks of consument
dissatisfaction had the parts been missing.
Second one is cleaner and interactive but it’s hard to draw ideas from
however it serves as a good exploration tool.
Version 1
Version 2
Distribution of theme popularity
This graph shows distribution of released sets in particular year for a
given theme.
years are on the x-axis while themes are on y-axis, the height of the
distribution curve represents how many sets were released in given year
for that theme.
It’s an example of both clean and easy to interpret visualization. Easy
take aways are f.e that ‘gear’ has been on popularity rise since 2000
and is a the most popular theme or that ‘bionicle’ after it’s initial
boom in 2002 died early on.
Minifigure relations
My magnum opus of this project.
This network graph shows relations between minifigures.
Every node is a minifigure, the size of the node represents how many
sets that minifigure appeared in and the depth of green color represents
how many themes it appeared in.
Two minifigures are connected if they appeared in at least one common
theme.
This graph is interesting, pleasing to look at and can provide some
interesting insights, and thanks to it’s interactivity it’s easy to
explore.
Straight from the get go we can figure out which minifigure is most
generic bo looking at amount of links coming out from the node.
With further analysis we can find fully connected graphs of nodes which
can mean with high probability that those minifigures are from the same
theme and that there exist some protagonist.
Conclusion
This project was a great opportunity to learn about data
visualization.
I’ve learned a lot about different types of graphs and how to use them
to present data. I hope that I managed to make them eye-catching, nice
to look at and interesting.